Volunteer Monitoring for Microplastics in the Connecticut River
Project Overview
Connecticut River Conservancy (CRC) has been piloting a volunteer microplastics monitoring program in the Connecticut River watershed. CRC holds a watershed wide trash cleanup each year and our River Stewards work in each state to “stop trash before it starts” by advocating for legislation like bottle bills and extended producer responsibility. There was no existing data about plastic’s impact on our waterways to support this advocacy work. Our members have also expressed interest in understanding how emerging contaminants, such as microplastics, are present in the Connecticut River watershed. We have been working over the past two years to develop a program that engages volunteers and starts to fill this knowledge gap in a responsible way.
Challenges
- Microplastics are pervasive in our environments and preventing contamination is too challenging/costly for a grassroots volunteer program
- Field and lab blanks confirm minor contamination is occurring
- No established Standard Operating Procedure for volunteer monitoring of microplastics in rivers has required us to develop our own and adjust as we learn
- Some opposition received from university level professionals who are skeptical of the value of volunteer level data in the field of microplastics
- Algae clogs our filters! We are working out ways to preserve our samples better before filtering
Successes
- We can definitively say that our local waters are contaminated with microplastics!
- Volunteers are excited to be contributing to local research of microplastics
- Analysis can occur during the winter months when our lab is not otherwise in use
- In Year 2, we were able to adapt a procedure developed at Staffordshire University using forensic tape to fix filter to slides so the slides can be reviewed more than once
- We will be developing the training procedure for volunteers to take over the reading of the results this spring
Results and Discussion
For this project, volunteers collected two samples each in 2021 and 2022 from the 13 sites pictured on the map below. Most sites were located on the mainstem Connecticut River. We also collected from 2 major tributaries, the Deerfield and West Rivers, and selected a remote headwater location in the HO Cook State Forest in Heath, MA. A few of our 2022 samples froze in our fridge and broke, so we unfortunately lost four samples. Thankfully, each of the samples that froze was from a different site, so we have at least one observation from every site for each year.